www.jonathan.pearce.name/

[quantus]

So, I decided to visit your main page and found it nicely laid out at first glance. However, that impression immediately changed when I tried to figure out how your website is organized. You seriously need a navigation bar of some sort to clearly organize your sections. For example, having the link to articles section embedded in the middle of the text on the left is just PAINFUL to locate!

[quantus]

Actually, I just remembered, the reason I went to your main page was to see if you had a friends section or something. I was gonna suggest making it XFN friendly, but alas, I couldn't locate such a page.

[Jonathan]

Hmm. Last year, I did have a nav bar. You can see it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/200409300805 ... arce.name/

I went away from that because I felt like it was too obtuse. Also, I read something on joelonsoftware.com linking to a Nielson post about how full text descriptions are user-friendly.

My current full text description may be too obtuse. Perhaps I should rewrite it, or have a simple list and a list with explanations? Hmm.

As for friends' sites, here's what I got:

http://jonathan.pearce.name/links

[Jonathan]

My favorite all-time difficult personal website is

http://www.jwz.org/

[quantus]

The fundamental difference is that his homepage is trying to be difficult. Yours isn't.

[quantus]

Lists, as long as they are not longer than about 5 to 7 items are good. Once they get longer, I think some sort of intuitive hierarchy is necessary. Your old list was ok in length. The one word descriptions of one word links is the let down. If you're going to give descriptions, at least make them a little more interesting than reading a thesaurus.

[Jonathan]

Okay, I can work with this. Something like a condensed version of current sidebar, and then I make some other pages to add some hierarchy. I'll make up an example and post it later.

[Jonathan]

After thinking about this for a few months, I think the solution is to have a quick nav list with no descriptions and then a longer box with full sentences. Whenever I get around to restoring the rest of j.p.n I'll do that.